550 NEW BOOKS. it. Go back first to Descartes. For Descartes the idea of the infinite but that alone is inexplicable from the subject's own activity or as one of its constituents. Now compare Descartes with Aristotle. Although in detail Aristotle may seem to ascribe more to mental activity than Descartes, yet, according to his general doctrine, reason as a whole, and not simply one of its ideas, comes into man from without. After these preliminaries, M. Gerard- Varet has a study of the doctrine of Plato> especially as regards error. The difficulties with which Plato grapples in the Theaetetus are found to be due to his trying to define ' error ' as something given, not as a product of the mind itself. The solution, in the Sophist, is that there is a real ' not-being ' in things, and that this can be presented to the mind as an object. Going back now to Homer (in the Iliad, as most primitive) we find that the emotions and mental con- ceptions of men and even of gods are almost invariably said to be suggested by some other person, human or divine, or by powers external to the soul. Only in two cases does the poet recognise in the subject the cause of its ideas, viz., in poetic metaphor, where he is conscious of his own creative activity, and in works of imitative art like the shield of Achilles, where the mind of the artificer is conceived as the cause of the production. Can we not find a still more primitive stage, where the products of these activities too are thought to be something objectively given and not made ? Such a stage the author thinks can be retraced in the records of more archaic civilisations interpreted according to the modes of thought of modern savages. Myth, before it passes into con- scious poetic art, is simply an imaginative fillmg-in of the data of sense, and for its makers has the same value as the representative elements in perception. The forms of imitative art are endowed with a life of their own statues of gods become actual guardians of a territory and so are thought of as evoked rather than created by the artist. Reconstructing the modes of conception thus analysed, we find that primitive " ignor- ance" conceives of every representation as objectively given, and at the same time as animated and existing for itself. For each thing every imaginable transformation, and every relation with all other things, is possible. There are no such conceptions as those of impossibility on the one hand or necessity on the other. In modern metaphysical phrase, every single representation is at once substance, cause and absolute. Experience and reflexion by degrees impose limits on this primitive tendency of mind, and shape out the conceptions of relativity, impos- sibility and necessity. This last conception, by which modern science is characterised, has its origin in mathematics and nowhere else. It is from mathematics, in the deductive form, that the conception of undeviating necessity has extended itself to natural causation. The initiation of mathematical science, in this sense, was the work of the Pythagoreans, entangled though they too were in the illusions of primitive realism. T. WHITTAKER. L'Avenir de la Philosophic,. Esquisse d'une Synthese des Connaissances fondee sur 1'Histoire. Par HENRI BERR, Ancien eleve de 1'Ecole Normale superieure, Professeur de Rhetorique au Lycee Henri IV., Docteur es Lettres. Paris: Hachette, 1899. Pp. x., 511. A fairly correct general description of M. Berr's philosophy .would be " positivism plus psychology " ; to which it ought perhaps to be added that while the name of metaphysics is suppressed, the thing is retained. The latter part of the description, however, is too little distinctive. It might be applied to so much contemporary thought. The affinity with
